Camera view shapes?

Hi all,

I was just wondering and I'm not sure I'll get an answer on this. Can camera views be different?
shapes like round or elliptical. Or can mirrors have different shapes.

I think some pretty cool looking effects could be achieved if camera view shapes were possible.
Any help on this would be great.

Thanks in advance.

Guardian

Hi Guardian, hmm, what would you want this for? The obvious answer is that you have a square screen (well, rectangular), and what with the old square peg into a round hole adage... The only way to have different shaped camera views (and mirror views, I should imagine, though I don't own the Pro version) is to have a panel over the top of the view with the shape you want cut out of it... And you can always use the "arc" and "aspect" parameters to get a fisheye view or a compressed view that suits the shape you have chosen...
Cheers,
Keith

Hi Ambit,

Well I don't really have a complete concept of how the engine works. But, basically I was thinking of real-time reflections on shapes such as spheres, wineglasses, metal objects, and in redicals or magnified class etc. I did a little search on this subject and found a few posts in the future forum and have seen some examples of this sort of reflectivity from other engines. I just thought that this might be an easy way to do this but as I say I have little knowledge of how the engine draws camera views. I know you can change its size and have several camera views running inside other views. Why not change its shape? Anyway just wondering if this is possible. I know others have written dlls for avi's to play on surfaces why not cameras?

Guardian

Anybody have an answer to this?

It's most likely possible via the SDK and DX7 environment mapping. However, I'm not familiar enough with DX7 to be able to do it

You can fake it by standing where your reflective object is and taking screenshots in each direction and making a texture out of them.